BTC BIP-110 fork stalls after launch

TLDR

Bitcoin's BIP-110 user-activated soft fork launched and quickly stalled on a tiny minority chain after just two blocks, leaving almost all hashpower on the main BTC chain.

1. The BIP-110 chain split at block 961,632, produced only two blocks, and is now dozens of blocks behind the dominant Bitcoin network.
2. BIP-110 aimed to temporarily restrict non-financial data like Ordinals, turning a spam fight into a deep governance and censorship debate.
3. For now the main BTC chain and price are largely unaffected; the real story is the political fallout and talk of a separate PoW-based breakaway coin.

Confidence: high - multiple independent reports agree on the fork behavior and hashpower split.

Deep Dive

1. What Happened To The BIP-110 Fork

When BIP-110 entered mandatory signaling at block 961,632, nodes running Bitcoin Knots began rejecting blocks that did not signal bit 4, creating a minority chain that split from the main network. The supporting pool Roughnecks mined only two blocks on that branch - 961,632 and 961,633 - before no further blocks appeared, while the standard Bitcoin chain advanced rapidly into the 961,700s and beyond, leaving the fork dozens of blocks behind. Reports estimate about 99.85% of global hashpower stayed on the main chain, with roughly 0.15% on the fork, which inherited Bitcoins full 127.48 trillion difficulty, making further blocks extremely slow and rendering the minority chain effectively stalled as described in this soft fork implosion report.

2. What BIP-110 Was Trying To Change

BIP-110 is a proposed Bitcoin Improvement Proposal that would temporarily tighten consensus rules to make embedding non-financial data much harder - limiting most new outputs to 34 bytes, restoring an 83-byte OP_RETURN cap, and restricting some Taproot-based inscription patterns, targeting Ordinals, Runes, and similar protocols. Supporters argue this protects node operators from blockchain bloat and keeps Bitcoin focused on money, while critics such as Michael Saylor and Adam Back warn it would invalidate currently valid fee-paying transactions and set a precedent for content-based filtering, weakening neutrality and censorship resistance, as outlined in this governance debate overview. Miner signaling for BIP-110 never exceeded a few percent, far below its own 55% activation threshold, underscoring how little broad support it had.

3. Impact For BTC Users And What To Watch Next

Because almost all hashpower, exchanges, and economic activity remain on the main Bitcoin chain, everyday BTC users currently see no functional change; the stalled BIP-110 branch has only two blocks and almost no infrastructure or liquidity, so it behaves more like an experiment than a competing currency. Some BIP-110 backers now discuss a proof-of-work change and a full breakaway coin by early September, which would abandon existing Bitcoin miners and create a separate asset, a plan detailed in this analysis of the forks failure and PoW switch talk.

Conclusion

The BIP-110 fork shows that without broad miner and economic support, a user-activated soft fork can stall almost immediately, even if it technically launches. It also exposes deep tensions over how Bitcoin should handle non-financial data, with most of the ecosystem choosing stability over an aggressive anti-spam rule change. Going forward, the main risks and opportunities lie not in the stalled branch itself, but in whether its supporters turn their experiment into a separate asset and how the broader market responds to that attempt.